All posts in Streams

Session Overview

Recent changes in the work environment have placed L&D on a collision course with performance management.

First, traditional performance reviews are failing. Managers spend more than 200 hours per year on performance review activities with the average company spending around $47 million a year on related activities and technologies. Despite this investment, 95% of managers are dissatisfied with the way their companies conduct reviews and nearly 90 per cent of HR leaders say the process doesn’t yield accurate information.

Secondly, employee engagement is declining sharply across almost every workforce segment with future career opportunity emerging as the top driver of employee attrition. Whilst only 30% of employees are satisfied with future career opportunities at their organisations, 6 out of 10 heads of HR are predicting an internal skills shortage in the next three to five years.

Unfortunately, only 26% of heads of L&D agree that learning experiences align with employees’ career goals and around 11% of employees’ time at work is wasted on learning activities that are redundant or misaligned with future capability requirements.

Facilitator’s Point of View

Our approaches to both learning and performance management are failing because they are disengaging to employees and not meeting current and future capability requirements. In a world of constant change and disruption, we cannot talk about performance if we are not also talking about learning. As L&D practitioners, we have a rare window of opportunity to place learning goals at the core of a reimagined approach to performance management. By doing so, we can prepare our organisations for the future and help our employees thrive in their careers.

LearningCafe Point of View

LearningCafe considers the boundaries between learning, performance and knowledge management to be artificial. Learning should exist to support performance.

Big Questions

Should learning goals be part of the performance conversation?

What role should L&D play in performance management?

How do we get better at delivering learning that meets future capability requirements?

What role (if any) should L&D have in helping employees achieve their career goals?

Disruptive Thoughts

L&D is facing an immediate threat to its relevance because it’s not keeping pace with future capability requirements.

In a world of constant disruption, we cannot have a conversation about performance without talking about learning.If we do not know where the performance gaps are, how can we connect employees to the learning experiences that will have them bridge those gaps?

Session Overview

What if employees were free to make a choice to consume or reject the Learning developed by L&D i.e. be consumers? Mandatory learning including compliance courses has been the engine that has driven the adoption of eLearning as it provides trackable, cost effective and a scalable solution to ensure that employees have acquired essential knowledge.

Mandatory learning however rarely addresses the higher level skills and mindsets required by organisations to stay ahead of the competition today such as innovation, resilience, customer centricity etc. Social, informal and workplace learning falls in the discretionary category and have a poor track record in most organisations.

Facilitator’s Point of View

LearningCafe Point of View

Earlier this year we released the “LearningCafe Digital Manifesto for L&D,” which is the result of thinking at LearningCafe about how L&D should adapt to provide value in a fast changing and digitally disrupted world. One of the principles of this manifesto is “Thinking of Learners as Consumers”.

Learners can now choose what, when and where they learn. L&D currently focuses on mandatory and compliance learning which is never a competitive advantage. Learning should be relevant and deliver value for money, time and cognitive bandwidth so that learners turn up. http://bit.ly/lcmanifesto

Big Questions

Uptake of discretionary learning has had a poor track record, not many start and fewer complete it. What are the causes?

Does discretionary learning require a different design and implementation approach which is more customer centric?

How does L&D make a business case for discretionary learning where success is not guaranteed?

Session Overview

Rapid change is the new fabric of doing business. Products and services that were revolutionary two years ago are rendered obsolete if they don’t adapt to market changes fast enough. VUCA – a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous and is the term coined to describe the new environment.

In this VUCA world we discuss the current state of Learning design. Join the discussion and hear from your peers in the room and consider whether we as a profession are addicted to “beautiful”.

Facilitator’s Point of View

In the corporate world we have moved away from designing what is needed for learners and moved more and more towards complex and ‘impressive’ learning offerings.

LearningCafe Point of View

LearningCafe has long held the view that “one size fits all” high end design approach undermines the value that L&D is perceived to deliver. We need to have solutions that fit the budget and timelines that business have available.

Big Questions

As a profession is Learning addicted to ‘beautiful’? Why?

Is there a place for ‘home made’ or ‘ugly but effective and cheap’ Learning in organisations?

What can be done to change this? Are stakeholder and business ready for this?

Disruptive Thoughts

How do people learn every day?

Perhaps we have linked our value to ‘beautiful’

Where does the expectation that all Learning should be beautiful, come from? Is it the business or L&D or vendors?

Session Overview

Fifteen years after it started, LMS market is still growing. Bersin estimated that the LMS market was well over $2.5 billion and grew by over 21% in 2014. This market is driven by replacement cycles and growing adoption by small and mid-size organisations.

But this happy picture masks the discontent that many learning professionals are feeling with LMS. While ideal for page turning compliance courses, the current crop of LMS struggle to accommodate the flexible learning approaches needed by a changing workforce including 70:20:10, informal, unstructured learning and performance support.

Change is in the air. TinCan/xAPI is the latest generation of SCORM standards, which lay the foundation for employees to access learning anywhere (think articles, Facebook groups, YouTube video etc.). However mainstream adoption of TinCan/xAPI by vendors and organisations is still a couple of years away.

In the meantime, we are caught in this no man’s land where implementing innovative, blended and informal learning designs in an integrated manner will remain a challenge. Some organisations have started to use other platforms and learning delivery channels (e.g. using intranet, social collaboration platforms etc.) but this presents a fragmented experience for the learner and creates inefficiency of learning design. We discuss the current state of LMS usage in organisations and if there are any options to deliver new approaches to Learning to overcome current limitations.

Facilitator’s Point of View

LearningCafe Point of View

LearningCafe has observed with unease the growing gap between what L&D and Business require and what LMS currently provides. LMS has become a fine tuned platform for delivering compliance and “101” learning but struggles with delivering learning for performance support and higher level capabilities (i.e. behaviour change) where the real value add is. LearningCafe believes that TinCan/xAPI is an important development to reduce the gap but may take some time for mainstream adoption.

In the meantime, L&D should not wait but look for solutions and platforms to supplement the LMS for flexibility and increasing design options. However, this approach will be “messy” and care should be taken to provide a consistent learner experience.